leyton.org

All go at the moment, so only time for a brief update:

• Wedding plans are proceeding well. We’re being cautioned by friends to stay calm as the day approaches, and I think we are managing that quite well. Got quite excited picking up the rings, as well as getting to see the finished product for something we’ve arranged. More on that after the big day

• Jury service. I’ve received a “you are on the shortlist” letter last week. Inevitable really given all of Frances’ family have had similar, so it was only a matter of time before I got one. I’m in two minds. On the one hand I’m fascinated by the process, and obliged to ‘do my civic duty’, but on the other it will stomp all over my business. Being self-employed has some big draw backs at times. More on this later, no doubt.

• Anime: Last year I hired “Spirted Away“, and absolutely loved it (Frances wasn’t quite as struck). Whilst poking about HMV last week, I figured it’d be fun to watch some more, so have “Laputa, Castle in the Sky”, and “My neighbour Totoro“. This last one has intrigued me as it’s frequently on muted loop at Ichiban. The blurb reads “Conceived as a family film devoid of conflict and suffused with the carefree pleasures of the summertime”. How can you not like the sound of that? Can’t wait.

• Comments (1): My advert music post passed 800 comments recently. Quite scary, but fascinating to watch, and I’ve discovered some great music. With Sigur Ros’s new album due, maybe we’ll start to get some new background music for adverts and documentaries

• Music: R.E.M. released their new album “Accelerate” on Monday. I “pre-ordered” it from the iTunes Music Store (as I had a birthday voucher to use), but winded up having to cancel my pre-order and order it again. Doubt I’ll use that service again as “you may not be able to download it when it’s made available” strikes me as undermining what pre-ordering is about. Surely I should get it first? As to the music, whilst the album is good, it didn’t really jump out at me on first few listens on the train through to Edinburgh yesterday. To be honest, I quite like where REM has been going (in particular I liked ‘New adventures in HiFi’ when it came out, which isn’t viewed as one of their best by critics), so this “return to form” leaves me in a funny place.

• Comments (2): It seems a comment from a friend on an old (2006) post about the misery of our kitchen/downstairs update, has attracted the attention of the company he was referring to. I take great care in what I post, and what I allow through in the way of comments, so this thread is exercising me right now. Thoughts appreciated.

• Work. I’m in the midst of great change. A new contract with an existing client, and finishing up with an old long-term client for a number of reasons (not least that work is coming at me thick and fast right now, so I decided to go with the challenge rather than the easy option). Plus this new arrangement, whilst featuring less working from home, does give me a bit more time to work on some longer term projects and clients. All good.

• Comments (3). A new plugin. In the hope of showing that there’s stuff going on here even when I’m not posting, take a look at the (tidied up) sidebar for the most recent comments to my various posts.

• Aching muscles. Went for a ‘trail/route familiarisation’ run in Pollok park with the club on Monday night. Oscar, one of the group B coaches, led proceedings. I discovered more paths I didn’t know existed in the park, and had a great time running through muddy puddles (much to Frances’ disapproval when she saw my shoes). But trail running seems to use different muscles, so came back quite achy and muddy. But great fun. Can’t wait for the next couple of seasons in the park.

So, bar the Jury service, things aren’t too bad.

One of the reasons I took up the piano last year was the chance to learn something entirely new: I was feeling that work (ie. IT) knowledge, even something like a new programming language, computer system or approach is largely a refinement or improvement on things I already know. Reading a book on a subject is certainly educational, but I’m hardly going to become an evolutionary biologist myself from reading more Richard Dawkins.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy such things, or that I know everything – quite the contrary! It’s just that these things don’t have the spine-tingling feeling of being a shiny and new concept, certainly compared to when I was at school and University when I first ‘got’ recursion, first grasped nuclear decay, and first used E=mc². Plus appreciating a subject is very different from using a subject in anger.

So because I’m starting from scratch with the piano, and music, the difficulty is finding somewhere to ‘hang’ new bits of information, so I feel that I properly understand it and have rationalised it. Music is exactly what I wanted, so very different from the IT, physics, mathematics or cooking I’ve an existing body of knowledge I can add to when something ‘new’ comes along. Compound time and swing quavers most recently in my experience have proven a bit difficult. Simply trying to understand what these things actually are, and how that differs from the concepts I’ve already learnt. Why, if it’s written like that does it sound like this? And why is this still sounding different from what my piano teacher expertly played? But therein lies the very joy of a new subject: the feelings of success and achievement are so much the better from being at the bottom and slowly working up.

From my points about swing quavers, perhaps anybody with a musical talent will be unsurprised to learn that my biggest difficulty (so far) is simply keeping consistent time. I doubt I’m alone amongst music students! But keeping consistent time across crotchets, quavers and so on, whilst reading the two clefs for both left and right hand is, to be blunt, a bit of a mindbender! More practice is (surprise!) the cure, but I’m also my own worst enemy for not always being diligent enough with keeping time in my head as I do so. Metronomes are relentlessly distracting…. Still not found the best way, or stuck at a method long enough to make it work.

I suppose on a related thought that the bland ‘musak’ and pop that infiltrates so much of our public spaces, and even the perpetual iTunes playlists of my 40Gb music library that I have playing whilst I’m working: I get music unbidden, or at the touch of a button. It’s produced in vast quantities, and is downloadable for free. It all seems to collude to make music a less valuable ‘commodity’.

With the piano, I may be struggling away in the foothills of this huge new mountain range of a subject that is ‘Music’, but my slow progress still helps create an improved appreciation for this age-old subject. It’s palpably helping me understand more about the music I do listen to and love, even before the raw feeling of delight I still occasionally feel as I ‘master’ (perhaps a little hesitantly) a new piece of music.

Music is certainly a lot more valuable, and a whole lot more enjoyable than it was a year ago. Learning entirely new things is never going to be entirely easy, and with most things, it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.

My piano teacher has given me a flyer for the winter concert from her orchestra (in which she plays the viola): St James Orchestra, Paisley. I thought I’d spread the word to any Glasgow residents who might be interested. It takes place this Sunday (25th November, 2007) at St James Church, Underwood Road, Paisley (map here) at 7.30pm.

Details are:

• Dvořák – Cello Concerto (Tom Rathbone cello soloist)
• Beethoven – Overture ‘Coriolan’
• Tchaikovsky – Symphony No 5

Co-Leaders: Fiona Butcher, Christine Love. Condutor is Eric Dunlea.

Tickets are £6, and I gather there are free tea and biscuits.

Radiohead have today released their new album, In Rainbows, and as is perhaps well known now they’re asking people to choose how much they want to pay for it. From nothing, to, well, practically whatever you want to pay.

Gordon makes valid points about paying for it later if he likes it. I’ve done the same in many cases (my Sigur Rós and Aphex Twin albums are a case in point), but the days when I actively sought out free copies have long gone. Don’t have the time or inclination, and am happy making occasionally bad decisions about albums on occasion (I’ll not cite examples…). But if friends “lend” me a copy (much like we all used to swap tapes) I feel honour bound to go buy it if I like it.

So there are a number of strong reasons why I’ve paid for this album up front even though I didn’t strictly have to. Firstly, I like Radiohead. I’m a Big Fan. I’ve never been disappointed in any of their music. It gets better every time I listen to it, and stands the test of time. I’m happy to take the risk, and pay for it, exactly as I would with any album I know I want in my collection. I won’t be going and buying it if it’s released as a CD next year – because I’ll already have bought it: I don’t have a need for plastic discs cluttering up the house anymore. They live in the loft now.

Secondly, I think this is possibly an epoch moment: Radiohead, outwith a contract, are a massive band who can do this without fear and show the music industry it can work to distribute music in this form without pesky DRM. Whilst I do buy stuff from iTunes Music Store, I regularly re-rip it so I can listen to it on my Squeezebox. I don’t have to here. So how’s it different from ‘taking a punt’ on iTunes? It’s not. I want the album, and they’re asking me to be honest in how much I think it’s worth. So I’m doing just that. So, yes, in one sense it is free. But I think it’s worth more than nothing.

Finally, I think digital music is massively overpriced, even iTunes (emusic is the only exception here). £8 or so for an album over there. Sure, there are distribution costs, but much of it is born by me. I own/maintain my computer/iPod I need to listen to it (which is a lot more costly than a CD player), I pay for my ADSL. They pay for a server infrastructure that should scale, advertising, and so on. But much of it is simply greedy record companies keeping prices artificially high and protecting their superfluous industry. When I buy something on iTunes, I’m restricted with what I can do (but am largely not bothered by them), and I don’t get much ‘extra’ with the music. I don’t get a nice booklet. I don’t get a nice case. I don’t get many freebies. OK, some purchases on iTunes do come with extras, but it’s the exception not the rule.

A digital distribution medium for music cuts out the middle man. It cuts out the record industry and all those executives. They know it. We know it. But we’re all tacitly going along with it when we pay over-inflated prices for our music. So take that padding away and we’re left with the band, their distribution costs (servers, techies, and a small bit of advertising), and their production costs. Of course, they’re not going to starve – their back-catalog will help there, but I don’t see how past success should devalue my current decision.

So I’ve paid £4, plus the 45p c/card cost. I’ve paid roughly half what I’d pay for an iTunes album, or a discounted physical CD. To me, that’s a fair price for what’s being offered to me. Music, with no padding. I could have paid more, but anything higher just felt a bit too generous. And less just felt I was demeaning what I think I am paying for: good music from a reputable band that’ll last me for years.

It’s certainly a dilemma, and it’s been an interesting exercise trying to put my thoughts together to explain my decision. No doubt some readers will think ‘muppet’, and others ‘cheapskate’. It’s up to you, and I’ll be looking out for the inevitable follow-up press to Radiohead’s decision. I just hope that when the figures come out they’re good news for independent musicians, and lay the way to a better pricing model for music – and much greater trust – between the music buyers and the musicians themselves, without the unnecessary and pointless interference of the record industry itself.

See also

• The BBC’s coverage of the how-much-to-pay dilemma

Glancing at this weblog right now you might perhaps be of the view that after a hard-days work, I do nothing else but run around the local park, run races and get excited about how some metric is lower than it was a few weeks back.

Whilst it’s true I’ve become quite carried away with running, it’s not all that I do when I down my keyboards and finish work. I decided at the end of last year that I’d like to learn something new: so much of my acquired knowledge in the last fifteen years has been refinements on computer science and IT. I was thirsty to be a student again. I wasn’t really feeling ready for the more academic challenge of learning a language, so decided to go with learning the Piano, which felt a big enough departure from my previous experience!

I’ve been very fortunate to have found an excellent teacher very close to home, so I can fit in my lessons during my weekday lunch break. After a month or two of lessons, and deciding I was going to stick at it, I took the plunge and got myself a proper weighted keyboard on which to practice, and it sits quite comfortably in my office.

As with running, it’s not always proved steady upward progress. There are plateaus of achievement which proved difficult to move beyond. Practice, practice, practice has been the main watchword here. As well as not being afraid to make mistakes in the lessons, and ask silly questions, my teacher patiently corrects them and gives great ideas and techniques to help through. As well as vital encouragement!

In the last couple of weeks though I’d been struggling to make progress with timing issues – keeping constant time and appropriate durations for notes has been a bit of struggle. But counting techniques, specific pieces, and more patience, I think I’ve started to make some headway. I’m also starting to find myself increasingly familiar with the written music, which I thought I’d struggle with at the outset.

I’ve some excellent pieces to practice: I’m using the first book in the ‘Classics to Moderns’ series, which are original arrangements rather than simplified pieces. I’m pleased to discover it’s also got some famous composers in there too – they didn’t just write dense eighth-grade music! Including the likes of Mozart and Haydn. I also quite like having a challenging piece to work on (deep-ends are great learning environments): Beethoven’s ‘Eccosaise’. It’s a fun piece I’m really quite enjoying.

So it’s all going quite well. But whilst my abilities may still be very basic, and the challenge ahead quite steep, it’s the journey itself that I’m enjoying: The half hour or so practice has become a great way to finish off the working day. Provided I’m not going for a run

For a few weeks now I’ve been running a programme on my main computer that scrapes the music I listen to on iTunes, and collates various statistics and details about my listening habits. Presuming you’re actually interested, you can see what music I currently like here through last.fm.

last.fm – A UK startup – was recently sold to CBS for £140m, in part of the recent ‘land grab’ by various companies into the social networking world.

It’s a super service that just ‘lurks’ in the background, and builds up interesting figures and statistics about listening habits, as well as a radio service and links to artist profiles, tours and details, and suggesting music that you might like. Well worth checking out.

I previously mentioned that Yann Tiersen was playing in Glasgow, and last night I went along The Arches for the concert.

It wasn’t an auspicious start when we were redirected to another entrance by a barmaid who didn’t seem too happy with her lot. For some reason nobody other than her was informing people, and we wound our way around the gloomy back street to get in. It didn’t really leave me feeling very enamoured with the event management, either of the Tiersen tour or The Arches for seeming not to care about how visitors were being marshalled. That you were told in no uncertain terms that there was no re-admittence to the venue just left a sour taste in my mouth.

I was, thankfully, prepared for something a bit more than ’some nice piano music’, which I suspect most people associate with Yann Tiersen. I’d done some digging before the concert, and realised he was something of a more varied multi-instrument artist. This concert was to be electric guitar focused.

There was a rather poor warm-up act – who seemed both reluctant to be there and very little variety. Indeed they seemed to be manning the merchandise stall afterwards which perhaps explains a lot. That start didn’t help matters, nor did the long delay after they’d finished improve the mood (Not sure many folk noticed or cared that they’d finished).

Eventually – after a good few audience impatient clapping outbursts – Yann Tiersen and his group appeared, and off we went. Whilst there were some great tracks, and some familiar sounds and melodies along the way, it didn’t really do much for me. Large amounts of electric-guitar thrashing featured, and some of this was faaar too long and self-obsessed. Interesting ideas are one thing (and there were a few) but 15 minutes later of the same damn thing, you sort of get the point and relish some change. Discordant notes can be good too, and with a violin and fiddle played furiously (breaking strings along the way) alongside the guitar, it proved initially interesting. But time passed and my attention drifted elsewhere: There were some serious fans getting very carried away from where we were standing that provided some entertainment, all the more so as I failed to see quite why they were so excited. People watching can be so much fun, if rather puzzling…

So all in all, not what I’d expected and taken on it’s merits a rather lack-lustre concert with only a few tracks that stood out as half-decent. We left before the end as I had no intention of losing out on my return train ticket and having to fork out £15 for a taxi (after a queue in the rain), something I wouldn’t have minded doing if I’ve had a half-decent evening.

Perhaps it’s all down to the fact that, essentially, I was at a pop concert for an artist I didn’t really know. But even trying to be open-minded and enthusiastic about it (I’ve been to a few concerts where I’m unfamiliar with the artists, and generally enjoyed myself), I couldn’t take much away from it other than an overall feeling of ‘Meh‘.

I imagine everybody goes through it every now and then: A growing frustration with your existing library of music. Especially if – like me – you listen to music whilst you work. I seem to recall reading somewhere that we don’t listen to much of our total music selection, settling on some favourites and playing those. To that end, I have a ‘not recently listened to’ smart playlist in iTunes, so I can dive into some old tunes on occasion.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve ‘discovered’ a few quality bands of late. I’d previously mentioned The Decemberists, who Frances and I saw live last month, and still highly recommend them. Two other acts are getting a lot of play-time here at Leyton FM, and there are a few other bands that some readers might want to check out.

The first is Arcade Fire. They’re riding high in the charts at the moment with their latest album, ‘Neon Bible’, which I’ve been listening to for, er, a fair while now. I picked up their first album, ‘Funeral’, over the weekend and suffice to say it’s absolutely superb. My musical nemesis Gordon McLean (for it is he) enjoyed their Glasgow concert…. Sounds like it was a great performance.

I’ve not explicitly mentioned Joanna Newsom before, but she most certainly deserves wider attention. Quirky but evocative, she is a harpist who best known here in the UK for the music used in “Orange’s New York Blackout advert”. Once more Mr McLean [shakes fist] was flagrantly taunting me once more with his tickets to her Glasgow concert, one I particularly wanted to go to, but ebay sales were at a too-healthy markup despite my eagerness.

Snow Patrol’s latest album ‘Eyes Open’ was a Christmas present to Frances that I simply can’t get enough of either. It’s chock full of quality songs, and really deserves all the rave reviews it’s been getting.

On the fringes of my airplay time are a few others. I’m poking about Air’s new album (Pocket Symphony), but it’s not grabbed me after a few listens, and I’m feeling a mite relieved I didn’t go see them at Glasgow’s ABC after the Guardian’s review. “Four Day Hombre” have some potential that another week or two might mean they grow on me, but “Clap your Hands say Yeah” just sound like they’re trying too hard, and hit a few raw musical nerves in a bad way with their opening gambit. But more listens are still in order for all of these. And of course Scott Joplin has been getting Piano time and airplay too.

Suggestions from readers of music are always welcome too. Glasgow band The Fratellis were mentioned to me last night as a band to check out….

An interesting, and enjoyable, by-product of learning the piano has been an increased awareness of music, and a re-introduction to some music that I’d forgotten about. Scott Joplin is a case in point.

Having pretty much reached the end of the first book of piano music, my teacher had suggested I have a think about what I’d like to play next. So on a visit to the music shop in town last weekend, I spent a good while poking about their piano music and lesson books trying to find something that would fit the bill. I eventually found a book that looked about right (turns out it’s a bit more advanced than I’d realised!), and as I leafed through the book came across a simple arrangement of his classic piece “The Entertainer” (Real player reqd).

This brought back a flood of memories (for some reason it’s a track I have very early recollections of) from my childhood (as well as a plan to hire the classic “The Sting” movie, which featured The Entertainer). I just knew I had to learn it eventually, and my teacher picked up on that when I told her the story, so we started poking about the score and playing the treble part. Away from lessons though I thought there must be more to this composer than this, and picked up a “Best of Scott Joplin” album to listen to. Ragtime wasn’t a term I was particularly familiar with either, but is the name for the style of music he was closely associated with (indeed, he was known as ‘The King of Ragtime’). It’s regarded as the first truly original American music genre, pre-dating Jazz.

My “Best of Scott Joplin” album is certainly getting a lot of play at the moment, and it’s very cheerful and upbeat too (Useful on damp and grey Glasgow winter days!). Whilst I’m many years off being able to play the full version of The Entertainer, it’s already thoroughly enjoyable hearing the melody coming from my (hesitant) fingers as I poke about the piano, and it’s all turning out to be a fun and enjoyable way of (re)discovering music.

It’s funny how things seem to be working out, musically, right now. As I write this for publishing tomorrow, it’s not even 24 hours after having got back from seeing The Decemberists, and I’m booked up to my next concert, one I’m particularly excited about (but then I’m easily excitable and was just as excited about The Decemberists!

It seems Yann Tiersen (of Amelié sound-track fame) is visiting Glasgow on the 24th April for his first Scottish concert. Since taking up the Piano recently, I’ve already found an increased, if still very basic, appreciation of some of the classic music I enjoy has appeared. Picking out details no doubt blindingly obvious to people who are familiar with the finer points of music has increased my enjoyment immensely. So when “Comptine D’un Autre Ete: L’apres Midi” came on my iTunes selection recently, I realised that this was perhaps one of my all time favourite pieces of music, beautiful in it’s simplicity and emotion.

Way back when I started, my piano teacher had suggested I bring along any music I had, and unsurprisingly finding my cupboards rather empty on that front, I’d had a sort of notion to dig out something I liked and mark that as a goal. Well, it’s safe to say this beautiful piece of music has become just that: Set the bar high, I figure. The journey is going to be the fun part. So I ordered the music, direct from France as it happened, and have a half-hope I might some day be able to play it in some form or other. Eventually. It doesn’t look anything close to easy. Yet to discover – purely by accident as I was flicking through a copy of the Big Issue – Yann Tiersen himself was visiting Glasgow in April was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down. Suffice to say I’m already very excited by the prospect, although I doubt I’ll get that much in the way of hints or clues, from seeing and hearing the composer himself!

It’s interesting also to discover a new use for the Internet: It’s quite the musical place even when you take away illegal mp3’s. Taking this piece of music as an example, I discovered a lovely graphical animation to the piece which, I think, captures the essence of the piece perfectly (even if the characters themselves are a bit rough around the edges). There’s also an surprising number of recorded renditions of the piece. I’ve misplaced the one I particularly liked, but here’s a highly rated one from the many I’ve seen. The idea is that budding pianists can pick up the finger placements from folk who’ve worked it out and can play it, presumably without necessarily having to fork out (or learn?) the sheet music: I know myself from when I was younger it can sometimes be easier to learn by imitation than understanding (even if it’s a short-term gain).

Whilst it’s an interesting discovery, I’m sticking to learning the piano the hard way for now. It’s far too much fun!